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Lite Lease: how to make car leasing fit your needs – and not the leasing company

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Lite Lease: giving you leasing flexibility

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17 January 2017

DOES a positive start to 2017 see you employing staff on a temporary basis who need transport, or do you need vehicles for a short-term requirement?

Perhaps sales have really started to take off and you need more staff – but how do you cover their probationary period without committing to a long-term business car lease?

So, a car lease that’s more flexible, then. Rather than a leasing company dictating fixed terms to you.

If any of the above is you, Lookers Lite Lease could be just the product you’re looking for.

Why?

Lite Lease can help as it’s designed to build flexibility into your fleet, without incurring excessive costs or risk.

How? Well, Lite Lease works by giving its customers access to a range of different vehicles, that are fully-maintained and can be taken on a minimum contract length of just two months.

Lite Lease in brief

  • Access to a range of new vehicles over a shorter contract period
  • Contract lengths from just two months
  • Low rentals without being tied into a long term contract.
  • Good for temporary staff or short term vehicle requirements

Popular with construction and advisory sectors, could it work best for your business too? Business Car Manager spoke to managing director, Andrew Collett, to find out more about Lite Lease.

Lite Lease is aimed at people who need a short-term lease car – are there any limitations on the models available?

“The limitations are the vehicles that we have in stock at the time really. So we carry a reasonably wide stock of mainly prestige vehicles, so like Audis, BMWs, we have things like Audi A3, Audi A4, BMW 1-Series and we’ll have cars such as the Ford Focus, SEAT Leon, Nissan Juke, Skoda Octavia, Volvo XC60 and SUVs as well.

“So there’s a mixture of mid-range and high-end – it’s just basically what we have in stock. If someone wanted a Range Rover Sport for three-months, if we haven’t got one then we won’t go out and buy one.

“We have a list with about 50 vehicles on it, that are in stock and ready to go. Then, as we’re doing deals with manufacturers, putting new cars on, we’ll offer out those as they come on for a 12-month Lite Lease. So we’ve done things like the SEAT Leon ST Technology, which we’ll offer out to our clients. Plus, Ford Transits – we’ve just done some of those. We do some commercial vehicles as well, but it’s mainly cars.

“We’ve just taken a batch of Audi A3s as well, so as we take on new ones, we’ll let our clients know about them.”

You mentioned that the Lite Lease list has about 50 cars on it – does it fluctuate throughout the year

“It fluctuates at certain times of the year, as you can imagine when we come up to March and September, we normally get quite a lot of demand from our clients for temporary vehicles as their new ones come through. So our stocks will drop down, normally sticking around 30 to 40 through most of the year, then we manage it by bringing new vehicles in.”

This sounds like a comprehensive list, which changes on a seasonal basis, but are you finding any trends in terms of popular models?

“We will tend to put on vehicles that have sat-nav and Bluetooth, because they’re business requirement cars. What we will try to do when adding vehicles on to the fleet, is that we will buy mid-range vehicles, from a premium marque.

“Say someone is normally entitled to a Ford Mondeo and we offer them an Audi A3 or A4, they’re more likely to take that. If someone’s driving an Audi A4 and we offer them a Vauxhall Insignia, they’re not likely to accept that. So we find people will accept a higher-grade of vehicle, so we get better usage by investing a bit more in the cars and having a better quality of car.

Audi A4 saloon
Premium style: Lite Lease spends on more premium cars

“There’s also a place for less premium cars, such as the Skoda Octavia, particularly the estates seem to go down well for Service Engineers, more of the work type of car. So where we’ve got clients, who have a workhorse type of car, we won’t put them in a premium car. They’ll take an Insignia, Astra, Mondeo or Octavia, we do well with those, but we do buy more of the premium vehicles.”

Lite Lease is designed for a shorter contract period, starting at two-months, but what are you finding is the average length of lease your customers are taking out?

“They’re probably staying in them five or six-months when they take them out, so they tend to get taken for companies with new probationary starters, they’ll take them out as a Lite Lease and then keep them for six-months until they order a new car.

“They keep the Lite Lease on until that car arrives – they’re looking at a seven- or eight-month period. If the employee doesn’t work out, they send them back quite early – but we don’t get that a lot to be honest. So five to six-months is the average Lite Lease period.”

From which business sectors are you finding the most interest for Lite Lease?

“The construction sector is quite strong, the advisory sector is quite firm, basically where these organisations have a strong probationary policy. Medium to large companies mainly take them up because they tend to have a ridged policy about when someone’s able to order a new car. Whereas if it’s an SME with new starters coming in, then they’ll have a car until their new one comes through.

“Certainly in construction, where there’s a lot of recruitment going on at the moment – that’s been very successful. On the other hand, a couple of years back, with the recession, organisations didn’t want to replace their cars with long-term contracts because they didn’t know if they were going to keep the same number of employees on. They dropped into Lite Lease until they knew what was going on. We had quite an uptake of vehicles then, replacing new orders in reality, until they knew jobs were secure.

“With construction they may be on fixed-term contracts, so they’ve done a four-year contract, got a one-year extension, but their vehicles need to go back to their current provider. So they to talk to us and ask for vehicles for 12-months.

“The only proviso of Lite Lease is that it has be a minimum of two-months lease, or for as long as it’s economically viable – i.e.putting heavy mileage on. We do get some clients that are doing that, we have to contact them saying this one’s getting a bit leggy now – let’s change it, we’ve got a similar one in and will swap it for that.

“The people who like this product, like the flexibility, plus the opportunity to save a lot of money by taking people out of hire cars – this product costs quite a bit less than a hire car.

Is Lite Lease exclusively available on new cars, or are used ones also available?

“That list of 50 cars that we have, they aren’t brand new, they are various ages. Yes, some on there are brand new, but they’ll go up to two-years old and normally about 30,000 miles – at that stage we look to change them.

“When we offer out a brand new deal, that’s when we go out to the customers to say this is what we have, if you want to be early and take these up, we’ll make them available. We price them accordingly, so our customers can see a rental menu, then go down the list and choose the colour and mileage that works best for them.

“We mostly find for Lite Lease, that it is cars that have already been out there that are more popular than new ones. It’s just a business need scenario, they don’t care whether it’s new or not.”

Servicing a Mazda car
All Lite Lease cars come with full maintenance

Are other lease products such as Drive Safe combined with Lite Lease?

All Lite Lease cars are provided fully-maintained (this includes tyres and maintenance). Then you can add on to that any other services, once you’ve signed up as a Lite Lease customer. Once you become a customer of ours, that enables you to access our other fleet support services, such as Drive Safe.”

Are you planning on changing anything with the Lite Lease product for 2017?

“We’ve got no plans to change it in 2017, although we’re looking to enhance the service where we can. We’ve done that by lifting the quality of the cars this year. We’ve made sure that any cars that we’ve bought have Bluetooth and sat-nav – so we’ll only put new cars on at that level. We might offer driver licence checking and Drive Safe within it for a fixed rental – that would be perfect for SME customers who only have two- or three-cars. It’s something we’re looking at. It’s just tweaks to keep the product fresh.”

Have you any idea of the numbers that have taken up Lite Lease?

“Out of our client base of our corporate clients, there’s an 80% take up – that would use it in one form or another. So they might order up a new car and if they switch to us for their new car order, then we will drop in a Lite Lease car to cover the difference until their new car is delivered. With lead times for new vehicles typically 10-12 weeks, we have a high take up.”

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Ralph Morton

Ralph Morton

Ralph Morton is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Business Car Manager (now renamed Business Motoring). Ralph writes extensively about the car and van leasing industry as well as wider fleet and company car issues. A former editor of What Car?, Ralph is a vastly experienced writer and editor and has been writing about the automotive sector for over 35 years.

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